Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Tuesday week, I attended a remarkable but deeply distressing meeting at Diversitat in the northern suburbs of my electorate of Corio, in the northern suburbs of Geelong. Diversitat is a community organisation that runs a number of services in Geelong, led expertly by Michael Martinez, who is a giant within our community. Diversitat, as an organisation, is very essential to the fabric of Geelong. It grew out of the Geelong Ethnic Communities Council. It does settlement work in and around Geelong. Because it is a representative of the various communities in Geelong, it has within it a service for looking at immigration issues for newly arrived migrants, many of whom have come here under Australia's humanitarian program.

It is in that context that Diversitat were very concerned about what they were seeing in and around the Geelong community, and they wanted me to see it. It was hard to see, but I am very glad that I was given the opportunity of seeing it. I thought, maybe, this was about people on temporary protection visas and I thought maybe it was about people on bridging visas not being able to get their permanent residency, but it was about none of that. We were talking with people who had been given permanent residency in this country. They had permanent residency visas. What's important to understand about that is that means we were talking about people who will be living the rest of their lives in Australia. The fundamental judgement, which we made as a country about their security and about their fitness to live in this country, had already been made, so that was not the issue. The issue was about whether or not they could gain citizenship.

I always understood that it worked this way: we made a big judgement and a leap of faith, having gone through a whole lot of processes about whether we grant somebody a permanent residency visa in this country. But then we, in a sense, ask our permanent residents to make a leap in faith in us, as a nation, by seeking citizenship, and every one of these people has. I spoke to one man, in front of a group of 60. He came here by boat but had a permanent visa. He came back in about 2008 or 2009. By 2014, he had served his time to be able to qualify to become a citizen of this country. He put in his forms, but more information was asked for. It was ridiculous information, stuff that was going to be impossible for him to get; but he went through the process. The documents that he then provided didn't add up in terms of names, because names get changed. So he went through, in this case, the Afghan authorities here to get them changed. He had all of the documents again. In 2016, his documents were perfect. They were sent in. He has waited 18 months to get an interview.

The issue here is his ability to sponsor his family. I asked about his family. His wife and three kids are in Kabul, and have been since 2010. The kids are something like 16, 14 and 10. Think about that. They were two, six and eight when he last saw them. And this government has got him sitting there for two years without responding to paperwork, because he wants to make a commitment to us. We've already said he's going to live here for the rest of his life. It is an outrage. What is going on here is a form of persecution which is not spoken about enough. I knew something like this was happening, but I didn't know the details until I had this experience. And he was one of 60. At the end of the meeting, there was a queue of people wanting to tell me their circumstances. These are people who are already living here. We've already made the commitment to them that they can stay, but when they seek to make a commitment to our nation, this government is saying, in effect, 'No.' If we ever get the chance to govern, we will change this. But, right now, if there is a shred of decency in the Morrison government, they would change this situation right now.